Quotes About Discovery

in the words of Carl Sagan.

So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.

Then, having nothing better to do, I leafed through the index and amused myself, in a very low-key way, by looking for ridiculous names, of which Australia has a respectable plenitude. I am thus able to report that the following are all real places: Wee Waa, Poowong, Burrumbuttock, Suggan Buggan, Boomahnoomoonah, Waaia, Mullumbimby, Ewlyamartup, Jiggalong, and the supremely satisfying Tittybong.

McDonald Observatory in Texas

Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

there are three stages in scientific discovery7: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

the aforementioned Murchison, who spent the first thirty or so years of his life galloping after foxes, converting aeronautically challenged birds into puffs of drifting feathers with buckshot, and showing no mental agility whatever beyond that needed to read The Times or play a hand of cards. Then he discovered an interest in rocks and became with rather astounding swiftness a titan of geological thinking.

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, painted here by his friend Jan Vermeer, was a self-taught instrument maker.

To explain what kept atoms together, other forces were needed, and in the 1930s two were discovered: the strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force.

Traveling is more fun—hell, life is more fun—if you can treat it as a series of impulses.

Vesto Slipher, of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, was the first person to notice that distant galaxies appeared to be moving away from us—evidence that the universe was not, as everyone had long assumed, static.

Astronomers today believe there are perhaps 140 billion galaxies in the visible universe.

It is the patchiness of the record that makes each new find look so sudden and distinct from all the others.

In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.

Annie Jump Cannon (left) and Henrietta Leavitt, whose unsung labours and incisive deductions made Hubble's breakthroughs possible.

Finally, but perhaps above all, human nature is a factor in all this. Scientists have a natural tendency to interpret finds in the way that most flatters their stature.

there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

report in The Economist as much as 97 per cent of the world's plant and animal species may still await discovery. Of

of all the disciplines in science, paleoanthropology boasts perhaps the largest share of egos

It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn't actually tell you where babies came from. And these, you may recall, were men who thought science was nearly at an end. *

In this sense, according to Harding, every gene is a different highway, and we have only barely begun to map the routes. "No single gene is ever going to tell you the whole story

Wallace's theory was, by Wallace's own admission, the result of a flash of insight; Darwin's was the product of years of careful, plodding, methodical thought. It was all crushingly unfair.

It would be hard to think of a more overlooked person in the history of palaeontology than Mary Anning

3.18-million-year-old australopithecine found at Hadar in Ethiopia in 1974 by a team led by Donald Johanson. Formally known as A.L.